


go easy on me

by transversely



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 15:06:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was staring at the lantern, making her mind up about something. Her exhaustion was so palpable she she could have bent the air around her like a candle. When she spoke his skin crawled: it seemed for a moment like he was listening to something ancient—the mountain below him, the black inanimate maw of the ravine on its slow crawl into the distance, cleaving the older, colder earth.</p><p>“What would it be like,” she said, “to be right about something that would mean everything else had gone. Terribly wrong.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	go easy on me

**Author's Note:**

> An askbox fill, the prompt was for an Annie/Eren take on the typical Huddled Together For Warmth fandom standby. This sent my mind careening off into horrible scenarios, so it got...slightly out of hand. 
> 
> Contains manga spoilers, violence, mild sexual content, total guesswork regarding shifter physiology, selfish volatile people being selfish and volatile. Enjoy!

**-**

 

 

 

 

 

There was a tremor at the edge of his vision. He slotted down the grate of the lantern and noted the shadow, its height; he’d kicked off his snowshoes before he knew what he was doing and sunk knee-deep up to the cuff of his boots in an attempt to close the distance. “Hey! _Hey_ , why are you still here? I thought—you’d be halfway back to base camp by now.”

A circle of light sliced at her jawline, cleaving her face in half as she moved into its radius. The edges of her lips were pinkly cracked. He hadn’t seen her by himself in weeks; it occurred to him distantly that she looked terrible, but it was hard to properly categorize the thought amid the jostling of all the things he wanted to ask her: what have you been doing, did you know I’ve mastered that butterfly guard, what do you think about—policemen, fine motor control. Mess hall turnips. Tell me, tell me everything.

She shrugged and said, “Snow is hard on my delicate constitution.”

“Fuck _off_. Aren’t you from the mountains?”

“Maybe that’s why. ” She wasn’t wearing a jacket and when she rolled her shoulders under her pack he saw that she didn’t have iodized water.

“Is that supposed to make sense or—also you’re low on water, I don’t know if you noticed. Aren’t you always telling me to take better care of myself?”

“You’re confusing me with Mikasa, I personally find your lack of self-preservation instincts hilarious. Look how I’m convulsed with mirth. I haven’t even said anything about how you don’t see the need to wear a jacket in subzero survival training.”

“That’s because it would be _hypocritical_ of—well, come on! Let’s get to the next checkpoint, it’s already late. It’ll be easier with both of us, we won’t fall asleep.”

He was about ten paces ahead of her before he noticed she hadn’t moved but was lingering back, her own lantern held aloft. The darkness of the sky shuttered by trees was immense and where the light shaded her it swallowed her up so her face was crosshatched with shadows. Completely unrecognizable except for the set of her shoulders, the slight skew of her hip canting to the right as she occupied her ready stance. Things he would know anywhere. She hefted the wire grip in her hand and said, “You shouldn’t have assumed it was me.”

“What?”

“I could have been anyone, it was completely asinine to assume it was me just because you saw someone small. What if it had been someone else?”

“You assumed it was _me_!”

“That’s because I’ve been following you for two miles. I made an educated guess, you made a gamble. Don’t do it again. Go slowly till you know for sure.”

“You were following me?”

“Are you listening?”

“Obviously. Slowly until I know for _sure_ , no acting on some unproven guess, I _get it_. You’ll see next time, but—why were you following me?”

“I’m madly in love with you and this was an appropriate chance to confess my undying passion,” she said flatly, so he scowled at her and knelt to check the buckles of his snowshoes. His hair fell into his eyes and from under the curtain of it she was still visible, the unhealthy pallor of her skin in the contained fishbelly light of the snow. It was—he hadn’t seen her, that was all. He hadn’t seen her and the irritation was enough for him to garrote the buckle of the snowshoe as tight as it would go and straighten up and say, “If you didn’t want to practice—you could have _said_ so, you didn’t have to avoid me.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to answer a bunch of stupid questions.”

“Yeah, funny, right, that doesn’t stop you from asking them all the time. Hey, Eren, tell me all about your opinions on the police so I can drone at you about how _wrong_ you are about _everything_ —“

“I live in the girls’ barracks. It’s not exactly out of your way. You could have sent flowers.” She knuckled one eye socket, scouring the tiredness out. “I adore gardenias.”

 “Annie, for—not today, come on. Just don’t.”

 She went pointedly quiet. He got up. After a while, she said, “I’ve been busy.”

There was something odd about how she said it—the phrase felt like a mirage, like he could turn it over and find something else, something that would unlock how shit wretched terrible she looked and how it felt like she’d been scooped hollow by something larger than either of them were, but he didn’t know which way to turn it to make it give up its secrets. It just stayed in his hands, pressing down into the lines there; he thought of the keys to unseen places. Maps smudged out.

“Fine.” He’d tied the buckle too tight. The arch of his foot soaked up the small violence, relishing it. He shifted position and set his shoulders and fidgeted back, uneasy.

“We’re graduating soon anyway. Not going to be doing a lot of sparring in the scouting legion. You’re not going to get to keep that.”

“Not in the police, either—pretty great, right. You’ll get to slack off just like—”

“You don’t say that shit to me.”

It wasn’t even a threat, it was just a statement of fact, and she was right. She’d given him an answer but in the wrong order and it was what she always did, but he’d meant what he said: he wasn’t in the mood. He could feel the frigid mountain air separated from him thinly, as though by a skein of heat; his body seemed coddled, an envelope of skin holding him apart from the tumult outside it. The billow of rage that swelled up under his breastbone felt stale. He was back in that old place of feeling inadequate to what he needed and it irritated him, so he turned his back and snatched his lantern. “Come _on,_ then, if you’re going to—“

“I’m right next to you.” She was, as though she’d been there all along.

Up close it was easy to see the furrows of exhaustion under her eyes. Her skin had a thinned quality to it, like a watercolor laid down into a tray, the colors dimmed and dulled but he wasn’t much of an artist anyway and had nothing to say about it. He thought he should probably ask, but it was so far outside the idiom of how they talked to one another that he wouldn’t been able to find the words. Instead he plowed ahead, she matched his pace, she didn’t tell him to slow down for his own good or choose a more stable trail. They didn’t talk.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

They skated across a hillock that was clotted with powder. The snow was fine and glittery as sand where their lantern beams hit it, hindering visibility as the wind picked up and changed direction. It escalated enough that they had to change course and go down into the lee of a ravine. The trees at the edge sieved out most of the flying powder and they could distinguish the maw of the ravine from the ice by the perpendicular reflections when they held the lanterns low. Here the ice was darker, black like mineral so it felt like if he fell his skin would come away marked.

The quiet was strange with two people. It fell differently, like varying grades of snow. They’d always filled it with something, the thwack of metal on cloth on skin or whatever stray observations swam into their periphery, but it was different here, without that quotidian context. He moved his shoulders under his uniform jacket, knocked his lantern against his knee, thought about what it might take to climb the ravine in the daylight, if you could do it barehanded by yourself or if you’d need help. At the thought his knuckles twinged preemptively, signaling their readiness.

“Hey—“ he started. He never knew what he was going to say to her until he said it. “You’ve been—I mean, even before you did your little disappearing act. That day, with Mikasa, it was like.” His voice ricocheted wildly on the ravine walls. Stoking his restlessness. He swallowed and tried again. “You weren’t trying to teach me, you were trying to hurt me. I don’t give a shit, but. Are you going to tell me what you were playing at?”

Annie put her lantern down and scuffed a few scattered pieces of ice around it so the light was amplified onto the rock. When she bent down to adjust the grate the shadows on her hands were traced with a pattern like crystal, contributing to the sensation of being deep underground—the utter surreal isolation.

She said, “Why aren’t you wearing a proper jacket.”

“I—what? I just don’t get cold that easily, it’s always been true. I don’t see why it matters. Look, you’re being weird—you don’t have a jacket either.“

She was staring at the lantern, making her mind up about something. Her exhaustion was so palpable she she could have bent the air around her like a candle. When she spoke his skin crawled: it seemed for a second like he was listening to something ancient—the mountain below him, the black inanimate maw of the ravine on its slow crawl into the distance, cleaving the older, colder earth.

“What would it be like,” she said quietly, “to be right about something that would mean everything else had gone. Terribly wrong.”

“ _What_?”

Her eyes were half-lidded but looked like black craters in her face. She was taking the straps of her pack off now, letting it fall carelessly and ratcheting her shoulders back—the same motions she used preparing for a fight. “Come here.”

It was the little preparatory gestures he responded to more than what she said, but he unhooked his own pack and went; he’d gone when she was jerking a thumb towards the outside in the dining hall or cocking her head towards the training fields after strategy classes, it was habit by now, for his body to feed on that particular unrestrained adrenaline. He’d missed it, over the last few weeks. Craved it magnetically. Now she leaned back into the stalagmites at the ravine wall, where the ice was deepest, and sunk back against it, filling the cavity with her body. The lantern light’s sharp chiaoscuro evaded her. Her skin in the darkness was blue and pale and had a moonlike quality to it.

He flexed his fingers and gripped the ice on either side of her head, bracing himself to stay upright. Neither of them reflected on the surface, from where they were; it was like they weren’t there. “Hold on to me,” Annie said. “Arms around my waist.”

“Stop being weird. Tell something, anything—I don’t care, just—“

“I liked sparring with you,” she said, instantly, forcefully, as though he’d depressed a key. It had a somnambulist tinge to it as though she wasn’t in control of what she was saying, but she was looking at him, and her eyes were alert. “I didn’t slack off. I didn’t do it for you. It was what I wanted to do. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

He didn’t know what to say, so he did what she’d said, and wound his arms around her waist.

“Is this one of those things, where you lecture me about how to talk to girls, or whatever—“

“You’d know if it was.”

“Don’t even say anything weird! You probably have a reason, even if it’s a totally batshit one. Hey, it’s—it’s colder here, under the stone. Aren’t _you_ co—“

He stopped, because she’d grabbed his belt buckle. One hand on each side, thumbs braced on the leather inside the pewter square. The flare of heat that arpeggiated up his spine was so sudden it could have driven him to his knees, but he stayed upright.

He couldn’t see her eyes but he saw a sliver of moonlight along the edge of her jawline, the smoothened angles like ice stamped down under boots, the chill, removed curiosity in the set of her mouth. He’d lived his entire life being told to quiet down, relax, keep calm, stop taking things so seriously; he looked at her now, and he thought about her as a child in her mountain village, pistoning her leg out the way her adult self did with that same coldly elated curiosity that broke and bubbled and expressed itself unrestrained even in training manuevers that _nobody_ took that seriously, pressing down into the core of untrammeled violence that glinted through her usual finesse the way he used to bite down into a cut lip, seeking the sharp sensation that told him he was alive. The answering tenderness in his chest felt like a bruise. It was a bulky feeling, it had a gravity in his mind and he felt like he was rolling down a hill at breakneck speed, trees and stone and sky whipped into a carousel of incoherence. He thought he could feel the dark, swollen sky bearing down on them.

“You weren’t lying,” she said. “You’re not cold at all.” It was impossible to tell what she was thinking but her voice sounded full, like a decanter of water filled up to the very last drop. A brimming thing.

“Well, actually, you might—be warmer than I am—”

His voice felt unreliable—he didn’t know if he was saying the words out loud or not. “I mean, your _skin_ —“ His thumbs moved of their own accord, working up her shirt. He could feel a pulse jumping on either side of her navel where his fingers spread wide, cupping the slender hipbones; he thought about putting his mouth on the little flutter under her skin and then he scowled and concentrated on winding his arms more tightly, willing her to let go of his buckle and do—something with her hands; he didn’t know what, his mind felt shorted out. 

She slipped them under his shirt. “I was following you because,” she said. “I needed to know something.” She rucked up the cloth until her palms were resting on his chest, full of a warm, dry heat. There was no gentleness in the motion, it had a desperation to it, the way her hands had tightened on his neck, once, when she’d said _I need you to learn._ Subzero weather, and he felt, he felt _lit up_ , full of a swelling, rolling slow burn, a tingling in his chest and below the waist where she was—too far away, he could have done—he could have done a lot _—_ to get her _a little_ closer—

“You could ask—”

“Could I?”

“Sure? Of course, what are you talking about—Annie, you’re _really_ being—“

“We need to spar. Right now.”

“ _Right now_?”

“You don’t want to?”

“Well, it’s icy, and—“

“I don’t care. Do you?”

And that—that was their truth, the truest one there was. He let go of her and kicked his snowshoes free, not bothering to undo the buckles.

The ice and the rock were indistinguishable from one another so he took his boots off, giving himself the traction of the rivets on his socks; she watched but said nothing and eventually shucked off her own boots too. They worked in silence, unstrapping their buckles, quickly getting rid of their harnesses. It was like stripping and it was also like suiting up for a battle; he didn’t know what it was, it felt intimate enough that the inside of his mouth went wet. There was a thrumming in his ears and when she stepped into the moonlight he wasn’t surprised that her eyes were half-lidded but unstable, liquid—unbelievable. She didn’t look any colder than he was.

“I’m not holding back,” she said. “Just—you heal fast. You’re going to heal. Aren’t you.”

She was laughing.

“You’d know, yeah. Yeah. You of all people—”

“Of all people.” She took off her uniform jacket so he could see her—a condensed white mark in the darkness, like a gathered column of all the snow on the mountainside. She could have been a hallucination. “We need to—“

“Yeah—anything.” It was a senseless comment. It wasn’t even a reply—it was just what he felt, but he felt it bone-deep.

He didn’t realize what he’d agreed to until she threw a punch, which wasn’t something she usually did. It was too straightforward. She preferred showier manuevers. Things that looked far simpler than they actually were and made her look like she was above a fight when she wasn’t. Most of her finesse came from looking like she cared less than she did. A punch was—it was an admission of desperation. It was unsuited to her, it had no aesthetic value. Now it took him in the jaw out of sheer unexpectedness, and he heard bone crack. He spit out the blood and set his teeth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue off and then her elbow was in his solar plexus, smashing the breath out of him.

“ _Hey_ —“ he tried, enraged, and attempted to pick himself up but she scissored her legs and threw him sideways. She hadn’t even made fists. Her hands were open, clawed. He could see the tipped nails in the moonlight.

“Are you hurt?”

“What? Obviously! Get back here, I’ll—heal—“

She made an inarticulate, strangled sound in her throat and charged forward again and then her forehead came down on his and he nearly passed out. Fractals exploded behind his eyes. He got her in a chokehold which she broke impatiently, using no technique he could tell but just sheer brute strength, and then she used the same hold on him and slammed his entire body back onto the ice. In his red vision he could see her hair coming unbound. She got up then, dragging him by the belt buckle she’d gripped a few moments ago, and then she finally made a fist, and punched him in the throat. He got to a crouching position. His muscles screamed and he could feel the hairline fracture in his jaw pulsing; it felt like the first bruise he’d gotten off her when she’d kicked his shin, a sensation he’d come to associate with trust. She was taking it seriously—taking him seriously. It was different but it was the same as so many sun-soaked afternoons, not having scored a single point on her but exhilarated by the idea that he could, that she’d believed he could, that every time he was a thrown was a step towards a time when he wouldn’t be.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

His eye was going to blacken. He cut into a bit of the ice next to his head with his palm, and when it shattered he held it against his face. She was slumped on the ice a few feet away from him and he thought she was laughing again, but it was only heavy breathing; she was more winded than he was. That sense of oldness came to him again—the terrible unassailability. He understood suddenly that it would be best not to say anything at all.

“My god—“ she said.

Her arms went around herself. She looked like she wanted to put them up.

“Already better, look, look at this.” He thumbed his jawline, now pleasantly sore. “It’s just a few bruises, that’s what I think! That’s how I learn, you know I do!”

“I know.” Her hand was over her eyes. Face in her hands. “God. I— _you_. Of all people.”

“Annie, hey, Annie—“ He felt like a thirteen-year-old again, knocked off his axis. When they’d first started training she’d had a habit of snatching her hand back at the last second before he could grab it, _maybe I like watching you get up_. He didn’t know why he was thinking of it now but he was, and it felt like someone had cracked an egg inside his chest, a golden warmth spreading, a different kind of heat than what he’d felt under his skin, on hers.   “Annie! It’s—good we got to do this again. So see, I kind of get to keep that. And—so do you, I guess.”

She got to her feet, bracing her hand against the ravine wall. Her knees were shaking. “You’ll be safe,” she said. “I—you can’t even imagine. I didn't know if I could believe what I was seeing.”

“ _Obviously_ I’m safe, you should know that, come on. What have you even been _doing_ for the past few years?”

“Making a gamble,” she said, and then she took two strides forward, shaky, not at all herself, and seized him by his shirt, looking up into his face. Her pupils were wildly dilated; she looked—once as a child Armin had lost his favorite book, dropped it in the river, and the next day a caravan of contraband had come in from Sina and there it’d been, stacked in the two-penny crate with its waterlogged pages and the same beloved handwriting smeared out by riverwater; Armin had been shaking with joy at the miracle, exhilarated at the thought that something he thought he’d lost forever would stay with him, and that was what Annie’s face looked like now, wild-eyed and manic with disbelief and a weird, terrified happiness. “It was such a long shot—but— _you—you healed_ —“ and she moved her hands, her fingertips like pokers scoring lines into his skin, up his neck and cupping his jawline and then she was kissing him, arms around his neck, feverish and open-mouthed and ravenous, so exactly what he’d wanted and hadn’t known how to articulate that he couldn’t do anything but let his mouth be worked open under hers. She dragged his head down to meet her, flayed him skin from flesh. He staggered backwards tangled up and disoriented and feeling like he’d been socked in the head.  

“ _Hey!_ —what are you doing—“

She wiped her mouth with the meat of her palm the way she blotted off blood if he got her face in a fight. She looked inhuman, the strands at the edges of her unbound hair filamenting white in the darkness, and he—he could feel her pulse under her skin where he held her wrist, her exhilaration, the same thing he’d felt when she’d looked up at him three years ago on the training field. Tossing up her glance like a flipped coin. She looked like a question had been answered but he—all he had were questions, he didn’t know what to ask her, he didn’t know how they could be so bad at words when everything they said without them on the training fields had always been so clear.

“I wish I could,” he said stupidly. “Keep it, I mean. After we graduate. Sparring, and—you know. Whatever. You don’t have to keep it up for my sake. I don’t feel comfortable if you’re not being a vicious, selfish—”

She said, “I’m selfish. And it’s damn fucking mutual, so are you.”

“Well, okay, then. All right.”

“I meant what I said, I _need_ —you need to learn how to use your strength.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I’ll learn,” he scowled at her, still unsure what to do with the unnatural unsmiling vicious elation that still spangled her features, “I’ll learn, just _teach_ me—“

The kiss this time was slowed down so deliberately his knees nearly gave out until he got his head in order and pushed her back up against the wall of the ravine, letting her shoulders snag on the contours so she was lifted off the ground. She hooked her legs up on his hipbones, compensating; he wrapped his hands around her throat, put his thumbs in the divot between her collarbones, sucked on her tongue. It was a different sensation than fighting her, a swimming, buzzing feeling like two nodes connected in the lower part of his stomach. His eyes couldn’t seem to stay open or closed but kept snapping wide to see if she was still there, illogically, since her fingers were digging into his hips, drawing him closer to her, a tight, knotted proximity. He undid her belt, found the jumping little pulse inside her thigh again; he laid his thumb along it, muffled a curse into her bared throat. “You’re so bad at this,” she said, “aren’t you supposed to be _considerate_ —“

“Give me a break—I—” Their skin heated up with contact, smooth, slipping planes of sweat, so that he felt justified in rucking up her shirt, laying his palm flat against the notched muscles of her abdomen. She fisted her hand in his and yanked it sharply to the side, sucking bites against his collarbone.

The heat between their bodies overwhelmed him and his head swum so sharply he had to stop, knocking his forehead against hers and breathing heavily. Her hands on his jawline, thumbs resting on his cut lip that had healed almost under her fingers, the bruise chafing and throbbing pleasantly from the force of her mouth. He thought he could feel the mountain under him again, all its mystery and the age of it, but it seemed amplified by her presence, it didn’t diminish it.  

I don’t know what you need from me, he thought. I hope you got it. I hope you— he didn’t know how to hook any of this into what they were doing, so he pulled her back by her hair a little, tipping her chin back so he could see her the way she’d been on the training fields since they were younger, looking down through half-lidded eyes, her gaze filled with an excitement that was only a shifted version of what he felt. Like hearing the same song transposed into a different key, sung back at him.

“So was that,” he said. His voice cracked. He tried again. “So was that a _gamble._ Did you find out what you needed.”

“Yeah,” she said, and he heard the truth of it, through so many layers of everything else. Clear as a bell. “You and I—we’re the same.”

 

 

 

 

the end 

**Author's Note:**

> so the bullshit theory at play here is that Annie could easily have harbored suspicions about Eren being a shifter thanks to his quick healing and body temperature, which she'd have noticed earlier than anyone else as his hand-to-hand mentor; it would explain a lot about her loaded comments in that last training flashback, and her urgency about getting him to "use his strength" and capturing him on her own during the female titan arc. WHO KNOWS IF THIS IS PLAUSIBLE? not me, certainly, but the idea was compelling.
> 
> thanks for reading!


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